EVENTS

The Smart Businessman Shall Save Us!

The GOP continues their plan to shred the Affordable Care Act, and toss it out the window, along with the health of most people here in uStates. They have not come up with any plan that is remotely effective, or which will not throw everything into absolute chaos. Physicians are quite alarmed, and have said as much, not that it seems to be having much impact.

People in general are quite alarmed over the so-called healthcare plans which have been fronted so far, but even that is not enough to alarm Trumpoids, who insist on staying stupid:

That said, some of these voters also said they didn’t think Trump and the GOP would really go through with enacting such plans.

“When told Mr. Trump might embrace a plan that included these elements, and particularly very high deductibles, they expressed disbelief,” writes the Times. “They were also worried about what they called ‘chaos’ if there was a gap between repealing and replacing Obamacare. But most did not think that, as one participant put it, ‘a smart businessman like Trump would let that happen.’”

Oh for fuck’s sake, what is it going to take for these people to wake the fuck up? Smart businessman? Please. This is the asshole who refuses to divulge his taxes, most likely because he does not have the money he claims he does, and he has a very long string of failures trailing behind him, like a filthy, mile long strip of toilet paper. Trump is a fraud, that’s what he’s good at, not business. You think he’s going to come to the rescue on healthcare? You should be trembling in fear, because there won’t be any healthcare. If you have health issues, see to them now.

This sort of lionization, bordering on deification, of businesspeople (but mostly businessmen of course, can’t have good capitalism without misoginy) is one of the mainstays of American culture that I find most pathetic. So powerful is the prosperity gospel and the American Lie, I mean Dream? It’s so hard for me to understand… In the minds of some people it truly seems that businesspeople can do no wrong, that they truly are superior in every way to the “common folk” and thus can’t not deserve anything that they’ve got. I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen comments in the vein as “I don’t like the guy, but he’s a good businessman and I respect that,” (not necessarily about Trump.) They never fail to make me cringe.

A. smart. businessman. A. (smart?) businessman. The thing I keep coming back to, over and over again, is-- have none of these people who voted for Trump because he was a “good businessman” ever been downsized? Have they never been through a merger, a restructuring “for the good of the company,” have they never had their hours slashed, their benefits cut, their scheduled fucked with to the point that it cost them a chunk of their paychecks or their job itself? Have they never been kept below full time hours even though they needed the benefits? Have they never been in a union that was busted, or tried to organize and been subjected to penalties?

Or have they been through all of that and somehow still think businessman = benevolent hand of loving fiscal responsibility rather than = profit motivated greed goblin beholden only to his shareholders? Do they think corporations are run the same way the corner hardware store was before Walmart drove them out of business? Worse yet, do they make no connection whatsoever between Trump and that Walmart? Or is it more like, “Sure, our friend Sally was driven out of business after 30 years but at least we get to pay a dollar less for a hammer, and besides, what happened to Sally could never happen to us.”

Oh for fuck’s sake, what is it going to take for these people to wake the fuck up?

I suspect that is intended as a rhetorical question. However, I’m sorry to say that it that it just ain’t happenin’.

When the right wing propaganda bubble blames the Iraq War and 9/11 on Obama, claims that things are worse after the last 8 years, and other easily refutable and demonstrably wrong claims, and the sheep lap it up, something like blaming Obama and the dems for Everything Bad(TM) will continue to be the M.O., and will continue to be effective.